BOWiki is a collaborative editor for biomedical knowledge, gene functions and annotations; hence, it could be considered as a gene function wiki. It will be used to collaboratively edit biomedical knowledge, biological information about genes and the latest scientific results.

BOWiki employs our biological core ontology GFO-Bio to provide biological categories and background knowledge. GFO-Bio is itself based on the top-level ontology General Formal Ontology (GFO), including the Ontology of Functions (OF). BOWiki uses the concepts and relations defined in the OWL version of GFO-Bio in order to verify the consistency of its semantic information. To achieve this, every wikipage is typed (with a category from GFO-Bio), and each argument of a relation is restricted with a category. N-ary relations are also supported, including the definition of new relations. The description logic reasoner Pellet is used to perform queries and verify the consistency of information as it is entered.

System and Documentation

A demo instance of the system can be found at http://bowiki.net . Please see also there for further documentation, e.g. a Tutorial.

Source code releases are available from http://onto.eva.mpg.de/trac/BoWiki .

Mailingslists

For questions and suggestions about using BOWiki the bowiki-users mailinglist is available. Developer related mails should be sent to the bowiki-dev mailinglist.